Do you remember the days of CS6 and earlier? Before the dreaded horror of Adobe Creative Cloud, you would buy a program, install it on your macbook pro with the inbuilt disc drive, file the serial number away in your bottom drawer and go about your business. If you hit a quiet patch with work, Photoshop wouldn’t hold your files ransom demanding blood money.
Fast forward to today and even taking a sh*t feels like it requires a monthly subscription fee.
Somewhere along the way, the software giants stopped creating tools that you wanted to invest in each iteration because it moved the industry forward, and they started charging you for every tiny utility. Every program, asset library, and plugin came with annual commitments and automatic renewals. They stopped selling the tools and started charging us to hold them.
And the tech landlords didn’t stop there. They spent the last 5 years gathering every piece of human output and blended it all together under the guise of AI tools that help us ‘optimise’ by feeding us slop. And they decided it now has a head cost of at least $50 dollars a month to sit at that table. What they didn’t realise was that they handed people the keys to the house.
We spent years screaming into the void about copyright theft. No one listened. They told us that the change was coming whether we liked it or not and we needed to get onboard or get left behind. Well the shoe is on the other foot, and people are looking for someone to kick.
It used to take a team of experts months to reverse engineer a program, but now using AI people can spit it out in an afternoon. Tech landlords spent years squeezing every penny out of their users who are now starting a revolution in the form of ‘vibe coding’. They are using their own tools against them to rebuild their programs without the subscription fee.
In case you haven’t seen the news, ‘vibe coders’ have spent the last couple of weeks rebuilding the entirety of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite and Microsoft 365 into free to use versions for anyone to get their hands on. We tested them out and they are definitely rough around the edges, but with the amount of people working on them still and fixing the bugs, I think Adobe and Microsoft need to move fast.
When we were the victims, it was all "fair use" and in the name of "progress." Now that their bottom line is the target, I expect the litigation to come thick and fast. High-stakes lawsuits, panicked lobbying, and calls for emergency regulation will be commonplace for the next 18 months.
That is obviously just my armchair prediction, and I don't pretend to have a crystal ball to see what the endgame looks like, but it will get messy and loud quickly.
The saying goes: if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
My hope is that the incoming corporate panic forces some common sense back into the room, making companies focus on providing genuine value to people again. We actually want to invest in tools we believe in. We used to put Photoshop stickers on our laptops... different times. What we don't want is to spend our working lives renting our craft back from digital landlords.
Viva la rentvolution.
